Parsing Existence

[Guyau]

I was too hasty and overstepping when I said that Rand’s position on metaphysics and logic commends ways of developing modal logic different from what Bostock would or should commend given their divergence on the following: Rand’s conception of logic as resting on the axiom existence exists entails, I maintain, that it is not logically possible that existence might not have been. Whereas Professor Bostock maintains that it is a logical possibility that nothing should have existed at all.

Perhaps the two perspectives should indeed lead to different developments of modal logic, but I have not followed that through to see if it is so. Here is what difference is evident from Bostock's Chapter 8, "Existence and Identity."

Sticking to Rand’s idea that logic rests on the axiom that existence exists, I would say that all logically possible worlds are relatable to the actual world and that all logically possible worlds are relatable to each other via the actual world. That is, the appropriate modal logic for broadly logical necessity is some variety of S5, which is a normal modal logic.

Bostock uses his contention that it is a logical possibility that nothing should have existed at all to motivate a dilemma: Either one must plunk for a non-normal modal logic as the logic appropriate for logical necessity or one must adopt a certain sort of non-orthodox classical logic (where classical here means non-modal). He favors the latter alternative, and for all I know, it may be that that is a classical logic square with Rand’s conception of metaphysics and logic. But from an Objectivist perspective, neither the dilemma nor the non-orthodox classical logic can be motivated by an alleged logical possibility that nothing should have existed at all.

Leaving now comparison with Bostock, let me add a bit more on Rand. In view of the implications I wrought from Rand’s further metaphysics and epistemology in my “Universals and Measurement” (JARS V5N2), we should readily notice also that although metaphysical possibilities are wider than physical possibilities, they are not wider than logical possibilities. For in Rand’s metaphysics, all concretes stand in some measurement relations to some other concretes in at least the ordinal-scale (or ordered-geometry) levels of measurement relations. And mathematical possibility will not extend further than logical possibility.

Possibility

Michael Jubien

Oxford 2009

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subj...i=9780199232789

From the publisher:

Possibility offers a new analysis of the metaphysical concepts of possibility and necessity, one that does not rely on any sort of "possible worlds." The analysis proceeds from an account of the notion of a physical object and from the positing of properties and relations. It is motivated by considerations about how we actually speak of and think of objects.

Michael Jubien discusses several closely related topics, including different purported varieties of possible worlds, the doctrine of "essentialism," natural kind terms and alleged examples of necessity a posteriori. The book also offers a new theory of the functioning of proper names, both actual and fictional. The discussion of natural kind terms and necessity a posteriori depends in part on this theory.

See also:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ost&p=30460

http://www.solopassion.com/node/5951#comment-67905

Edited March 31, 2009 by Stephen Boydstun

[BaalChatzaf]

See also:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ost&p=30460

http://www.solopassion.com/node/5951#comment-67905

Without a doubt you are the brightest bulb on our Christmas Tree. You have also cost me a fortune in books I have purchased after reading your postings.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anonrobt]

See also:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...ost&p=30460

http://www.solopassion.com/node/5951#comment-67905

Without a doubt you are the brightest bulb on our Christmas Tree. You have also cost me a fortune in books I have purchased after reading your postings.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Yes - but, ah - the quality of the books...;-)

[am in the same boat - lol]

[Guyau]

.

Can Science Change Our Notion of Existence?

Jody Azzouni (2011)

[Guyau]

.

Timothy Williamson (#150) has an important work due out in June – Modal Logic as Metaphysics.

[BaalChatzaf]

.

Can Science Change Our Notion of Existence?

Jody Azzouni (2011)

Very interesting. Is she saying that we -can't-change- our metaphysical notion of existence or that we -haven't changed- it? In a way she might be right. Once we have grown a notion of existence in our brains starting from infancy we are hard put to amputate it. Perhaps the only way to produce a human with a different notion of existence is to raise it in circumstances that we have not yet formulated.

Hmmmmm.... Very, very, very interesting. She raises a very good point that cannot be dismissed with either the flick of a hand or the flick of an idea.

Maybe there is something to philosophy after all....

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Maybe there is something to philosophy after all....

Oh my God!

Miracles do happen!

(I like ribbing Bob. It's one of my guilty pleasures. But Bob's good people all the way to the core. )

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Maybe there is something to philosophy after all....

Oh my God!

Miracles do happen!

(I like ribbing Bob. It's one of my guilty pleasures. But Bob's good people all the way to the core. )

Michael

That philosopher made me into a cat. She gave me paws.

[Guyau]

In the present post, I want to draw attention to and to dispute a recent attack on Rand’s idea that consciousness stands as a philosophical axiom. The criticism of this idea comes from Prof. Fred Seddon (Philosophy) in his recent review of a book titled EXPLORING “ATLAS SHRUGGED”: AYN RAND’S MAGNUM OPUS (2021). That book is a collection of essays by Prof. Edward Younkins (Business). Seddon’s review is in the December 2022 issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES, to which my page citations refer in the following.

Seddon’s springboard to this issue is a statement by Younkins that an axiom “cannot be reduced to other facts or broken down into component parts.” Seddon responds: “Yet consciousness depends on other facts, like the brain or body. Consciousness is an attribute, not a thing, and attributes depend on the entity of which they are attributes.”(p. 237) Furthermore, secondly, “unlike existence and identity, consciousness did not always exist. For billions of years there was no consciousness.” Thirdly, “there is no proof by denial for consciousness. It makes perfectly good sense to say there was no consciousness, whereas it makes no sense to say there was a time when there was no existence or identity.”

Concerning Seddon’s third criticism, I say: proof by contradiction in denial of an axiom is indeed a traditional necessary condition that Rand accepted for having the status of a philosophical axiom, as she indicated in Galt’s speech and in ITOE. The fact that consciousness has not always existed does not change the circumstance that to affirm existence or any facts of existence implicitly affirms the fact of consciousness at work in mustering the assertion. To say that consciousness is identification of existence is to define the fundamental nature of consciousness from which all other episodes that are ordinarily spoken of as consciousness are causal and conceptual derivatives (such as dreams or hallucinations). Consciousness as identification of existence is an axiom for an epistemology, specifically a stand on the relation of mind to world informing and constraining all right additional epistemology.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that IT exists and that you KNOW it.” (AS, pp. 1015–16)

In my own modulation of Rand’s metaphysics, as set out in my fundamental paper “Existence, We”, the axiomatic concept consciousness is continued as fundamentally consciousness of existence, but the fundamental division of existing things into existence and consciousness (the existent that is consciousness) is kicked upstairs a bit by the division: existence and of-existence, where the latter includes any living existent, including the living existent that is consciousness. Nevertheless, what Rand said about the way in which consciousness is an axiom still holds. The circumstance that consciousness and life did not always exist, Seddon’s third rub, is irrelevant to the point of having a set of axioms needing to be put to work, according to Rand, for the human level of consciousness. My reply to Seddon’s third criticism also replies to his second criticism.

To Seddon’s first criticism, I say: To say, as Seddon does, that consciousness is an attribute, not a thing, and therefore consciousness is fundamentally dependent (on things, on entities), is to hold Rand’s division of identity into categories (entity, action, attribute, relation) to an exclusivity standard, which was held for Aristotle’s categories, that she did not accept. In Galt’s Speech, Rand refers to the solar system as a thing, as an entity. Yet it can be allowed also, considering further aspects of the solar system, to be a thing composed of component things and their motions. Rand did not take up the picture in which if something belongs to one metaphysical category, it can in no wise ever belong to another category. Indeed any action (one of Rand’s categories) when considered in its systematic situation can also be an entity. The system that is the instrumentation and master control system of an animal can also be a combine of entities as well as a combine of activities. Where that system amounts to consciousness of existents as entities, we rightly say all of these: Mind is a system, which is to say, an entity; mind is an activity, which is to say an action; mind is an attribute of certain animals, which is to say that mind is an attribute. It is invalid to think, as Seddon reasons, that because consciousness is an attribute of certain things, it is, tout court, dependent on other things and therefore cannot qualify as an axiom.

To say, in Rand’s meaning, as Younkins reported, that the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness “cannot be reduced to other facts or broken down into component parts” is not to say that consciousness cannot become explained by facts of life and brain operations, but that one will not come to such explanation or explanations of anything else without consciousness of existence and apprehension that one is conscious of existence, and those things are first-apprehensions in the order of knowledge. If one does not already have those in hand, one can be told nothing of anything nor understand anything.

[Strictlylogical]

2 hours ago, Guyau said:

In the present post, I want to draw attention to and to dispute a recent attack on Rand’s idea that consciousness stands as a philosophical axiom. The criticism of this idea comes from Prof. Fred Seddon (Philosophy) in his recent review of a book titled EXPLORING “ATLAS SHRUGGED”: AYN RAND’S MAGNUM OPUS (2021). That book is a collection of essays by Prof. Edward Younkins (Business). Seddon’s review is in the December 2022 issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES, to which my page citations refer in the following.

Seddon’s springboard to this issue is a statement by Younkins that an axiom “cannot be reduced to other facts or broken down into component parts.” Seddon responds: “Yet consciousness depends on other facts, like the brain or body. Consciousness is an attribute, not a thing, and attributes depend on the entity of which they are attributes.”(p. 237) Furthermore, secondly, “unlike existence and identity, consciousness did not always exist. For billions of years there was no consciousness.” Thirdly, “there is no proof by denial for consciousness. It makes perfectly good sense to say there was no consciousness, whereas it makes no sense to say there was a time when there was no existence or identity.”

Concerning Seddon’s third criticism, I say: proof by contradiction in denial of an axiom is indeed a traditional necessary condition that Rand accepted for having the status of a philosophical axiom, as she indicated in Galt’s speech and in ITOE. The fact that consciousness has not always existed does not change the circumstance that to affirm existence or any facts of existence implicitly affirms the fact of consciousness at work in mustering the assertion. To say that consciousness is identification of existence is to define the fundamental nature of consciousness from which all other episodes that are ordinarily spoken of as consciousness are causal and conceptual derivatives (such as dreams or hallucinations). Consciousness as identification of existence is an axiom for an epistemology, specifically a stand on the relation of mind to world informing and constraining all right additional epistemology.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that IT exists and that you KNOW it.” (AS, pp. 1015–16)

In my own modulation of Rand’s metaphysics, as set out in my fundamental paper “Existence, We”, the axiomatic concept consciousness is continued as fundamentally consciousness of existence, but the fundamental division of existing things into existence and consciousness (the existent that is consciousness) is kicked upstairs a bit by the division: existence and of-existence, where the latter includes any living existent, including the living existent that is consciousness. Nevertheless, what Rand said about the way in which consciousness is an axiom still holds. The circumstance that consciousness and life did not always exist, Seddon’s third rub, is irrelevant to the point of having a set of axioms needing to be put to work, according to Rand, for the human level of consciousness. My reply to Seddon’s third criticism also replies to his second criticism.

To Seddon’s first criticism, I say: To say, as Seddon does, that consciousness is an attribute, not a thing, and therefore consciousness is fundamentally dependent (on things, on entities), is to hold Rand’s division of identity into categories (entity, action, attribute, relation) to an exclusivity standard, which was held for Aristotle’s categories, that she did not accept. In Galt’s Speech, Rand refers to the solar system as a thing, as an entity. Yet it can be allowed also, considering further aspects of the solar system, to be a thing composed of component things and their motions. Rand did not take up the picture in which if something belongs to one metaphysical category, it can in no wise ever belong to another category. Indeed any action (one of Rand’s categories) when considered in its systematic situation can also be an entity. The system that is the instrumentation and master control system of an animal can also be a combine of entities as well as a combine of activities. Where that system amounts to consciousness of existents as entities, we rightly say all of these: Mind is a system, which is to say, an entity; mind is an activity, which is to say an action; mind is an attribute of certain animals, which is to say that mind is an attribute. It is invalid to think, as Seddon reasons, that because consciousness is an attribute of certain things, it is, tout court, dependent on other things and therefore cannot qualify as an axiom.

To say, in Rand’s meaning, as Younkins reported, that the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness “cannot be reduced to other facts or broken down into component parts” is not to say that consciousness cannot become explained by facts of life and brain operations, but that one will not come to such explanation or explanations of anything else without consciousness of existence and apprehension that one is conscious of existence, and those things are first-apprehensions in the order of knowledge. If one does not already have those in hand, one can be told nothing of anything nor understand anything.

It's as though Seddon is conceiving of an axiom as a law of nature, something intrinsic to the universe... forgetting that it is technically an abstraction, i.e. that which you must take as a given in the exercise. 

He's somehow forgotten that  literally the study of philosophy, must start with "study" as a given... otherwise you cannot start at all.

Edit: "Study" necessitates the "studied" and the "studier", consciousness and existence, which together are the bread, and identity is the juicy good stuff in the middle exhibiting and bringing forth all that tasty non-contradiction-ness.